News Archives

The Khronos Group has a pavilion at SIGGRAPH Vancouver this year. With 7 booths to accommodate a few of the Khronos Members like AMD, Codeplay, DMP, Fixstars and HUONE, lots of demos and five Birds of a Feather events this year, there is lots happening with Khronos. There will be lots of prizes at the BOFs including Quadro 5000 and FirePro graphics cards, an SSD Drive books and t-shirts. Most importantly there will be some significant news announcements this year.

The KDE development community has released version 4.7 of the KDE software collection and Plasma. The update brings a number of noteworthy improvements to the open source desktop environment. This is the first release including an OpenGL ES 2.0/EGL backend in KWin. This allows KWin to run on OpenGL ES powered devices as well as give much better compositing experience on the desktop systems.

The Khronos Group is thrilled to announce a 3D content development contest with a $500 cash prize for the winner. Deadline is Sunday August 7th, 2011 at 11:59PM PST. The winner will be announced SIGGRAPH in Vancouver and be awarded $500. Full details are available at OurBricks.com.

Join the Khronos Group on August 10th for the OpenGL BOF at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver! Khronos willl have Trivia Q&A, great prizes, demos & updates and a new tech announcement! Get all your BOF details on the Khronos Website.

The computing power of GPUs is now accessible to improve the interactivity of 3D graphics. Leveraging this capability requires optimum interoperability between compute (OpenCL) and graphics APIs (OpenGL/DirectX). This talk from AMD demonstrates how to compute and update geometry with OpenCL on APUs, how to update VBO on discrete GPUs, and how to compute physics data on OpenCL and transfer those data to discrete GPUs. Wednesday, 10 August 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM | West Building, Hall C, Booth 801, SIGGRAPH 2011

The Khronos Group is thrilled to announce a 3D content development contest with a $500 cash prize for the winner. The open COLLADA format is ideal for creating compelling experiences, but a great example is worth a thousand words. This is where you come in. Help show the power of COLLADA by creating a compelling piece of 3D content which can use as an example for the large and growing developer community.
Deadline is Sunday August 7th, 2011 at 11:59PM PST. The winner will be announced at the OurBricks event at the SIGGRAPH 2011 conference in Vancouver. For full details on how to take part in this contest are available here.

Using COLLADA Computer in Google Earth gives a 3D animation of the hurricane Dolly landfall on 23 July 2008. Using collocated NEXRAD and CloudSat radar data with visualization of CloudSat provided by the A-Train Data Depot Giovanni. The result is a very impressive 3D look at the hurricane and surrounding cloud formations. Math operations can be used on all the spacial object using the COLLADA structures right in Google Earth.

A few weeks ago, Google became aware of a security issue with WebGL: shaders could be used to indirectly deduce the contents of textures uploaded to the GPU. As a result, Chrome 13 (and Firefox 5) will no longer allow cross-domain media as a WebGL texture. The default behavior will be a DOM_SECURITY_ERR. However, applications may still utilize images and videos from another domain with the cooperation of the server hosting the media, otherwise known as CORS.

Apples latest release of Final Cut Pro is a ground up rewrite offering lots of GUI changes. The power behind this update lies under the hood. Final Cut Pro X supports 64-bit Cocoa APIs, and takes advantage of the power of GPUs OpenCL and multithreaded operations. The change will be obvious when you look at the Activity Monitor.

AMD's new Radeon HD 6990M is based on the TeraScale 2 unified processor architecture and the Barts GPU core. This is a mobile equivalent to the company's high-end Radeon HD 6990 PCI Express graphics card design and features 1,120 stream processing units, 56 texture units, 128 Z/stencil ROP units, and 32 colour ROP units. AMD has included support for OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1 and MicroSoft's DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. There was no mention of the Thermal Design Point, so it is unclear how much power will be required to run this new chip.

Hardware acceleration is all the rage right now among browser makers: it can speed up everything from animating graphics to laying out all the elements of a Web page. Tapping directly into the hardware at a low level not only speeds things up, it saves precious battery power, too. If you aren't sure what WebCL is all about yet, hop over to cnet where they have written up a well rounded review of this latest Khronos Group API.

ShaderToy is a simple tool for OpenGL developers that lets you edit and display OpenGL ES shader programs on Android phones and tablets. It's a fun toy for learning and experimenting with shaders while on the move. The latest version includes the ability to save and load shaders to the SD card, and load texture images from the gallery.

FixStars today published the FREE version of "The OpenCL Programming Book" on their website. The book is based on The Impress Japan Corporation publication "The OpenCL Programming Book (OpenCL Nyumon) " by Fixstars Corporation. You may also purchase a downloadable PDF version.

Samsung announced the release of "WebCL for WebKit" a prototype of a proposed WebCL specification that is being defined by The Khronos Group. WebCL allows JavaScript to run computations on the GPU (or any other OpenCL-enabled computing processors). Samsung released a video, in which WebCL is used for computing N-body gravitational interactions and WebGL is used for 3D rendering. For comparison, the same computations are also done in pure JavaScript. WebCL is shown to give performance increases of up to 100x (for these applications on the test platform).